The Commercial Assault on Children and the School Environment

______

Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development

Annual Conference, San Francisco, CA

The Commercial Assault on Children and the School Environment

March 9, 2003

Alex Molnar

This document is available on the Education Policy Studies Laboratory website at

http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/CERU/Documents/CERU-0303-72-RW.doc

______

Part One

ALEX MOLNAR: My topic today, of course, is commercialism in schools. And I want to tell you that my first ASCD convention was, if I look out at some of the people here and judge your ages accurately, before you were born, 1971. And it was about 1983 that I began to study what was to become the topic I’m talking with you about today.

And in fact, ASCD, in no small measure, is responsible for my interest in school commercialism. So, sit back, relax, and let me tell you an interesting story for about an hour and a half. At least it’s interesting to me, and you can decide whether it’s interesting to you as the afternoon progresses.

It was, I believe, at the ASCD convention in 1983 that I was walking through the exhibitors hall. And I had grown accustomed to attending ASCD conventions and walking through the hall of exhibitors. You know the entire scene, the canvas bags, the plastic bags, the various giveaways, all of the goodies, the overhead projectors, the booths for textbooks and office equipment and any number of educational and educationally peripheral products somehow associated with schooling.

And at that particular convention I walked past a booth and it was for McDonald’s. I said, well, gee, now that’s interesting. I wonder what McDonald’s is doing at ASCD. So, I went back to the booth, and McDonald’s had an educational catalog. And some of you will remember from your schooling days the kind of composition books that they used to use in school -- anyway, when I went to school -- with the kind of mottled cover. It’s a classic-looking composition book and you write your compositions diligently in there. And the McDonald’s catalog was designed to look like one of these traditional composition books.

And I opened it up and I leafed through it. And it turns out that McDonald’s was offering free curriculum materials for teachers on things like nutrition and the environment. Now, I said to myself, of all of the places that I might go to look for supplemental materials on nutrition, where would McDonald’s be on my list? One? Two? Three? Would it be on my list at all?

How about the environment? Would I go to Ronald McDonald for advice on the environment?

And I went back. I was actually teaching at that time a course called Curriculum Planning. And there was nothing in my course syllabus about McDonald’s curriculum. Nothing at all. And I went back. And most of the people who took the course were either people who wanted to be principals or people who wanted to be curriculum directors or people in some way who wanted to have a larger role in shaping the curriculum of the schools than they could as teachers.

So, I went back and I asked the students in my class, who then, by and large, were mostly teachers, and I said, look at this catalog. This is a new one on me. I haven’t been aware of things like that. And yet I am teaching a course called Curriculum Planning. Is this stuff in your schools? Are materials like this in your schools? Could you bring me examples of corporate-sponsored materials from your own personal experience in your classrooms and your schools?

It took me two class sessions. We met once a week. It took me two class sessions, and I had four boxes of materials like this. And I said to myself, I am missing something here. Because if this stuff is that pervasive in the schools, then a course on curriculum planning ought to be talking about these so-called supplemental educational materials. And that became what at that time was a very offbeat interest that I have pursued for the last 20 years.

I did not set out from graduate school, with a background in curriculum theory, to become the world’s leading expert on the curriculum of Ronald McDonald. But there it is.

And where have we gotten to over the last 20 or so years, since I walked through the exhibit hall at that ASCD convention?

And, by the way, I attempted, because at that time I was active in ASCD governance, I attempted to have McDonald’s banned from the exhibit hall. But I was never successful for two reasons. One is, the organization said, we need the money. That’s kind of familiar. I’ll come back to that theme. And the other was, McDonald’s has a right to free speech. Which is a kind of curious thing for a convention of professional people, choosing to allow or not allow exhibitors to be in their exhibit hall. But, in any case, based on those two arguments, I was never successful in having McDonald’s banned from the ASCD exhibit hall.

I haven’t visited this year, so I don’t know if they are still there.

But over the last 20 years, it is not just McDonald’s that has a curriculum. The Pork Board has a curriculum. The Plastic Bag Association has a curriculum. The Dairy Council has a curriculum. The timber industry has a curriculum. The oil industry has a curriculum. This is the curriculum as a kind of souk into which you wander, and anybody who has the money to pay for admission gets to set up a booth.

We have ads on the side of school buses. We have exclusive agreements with bottling companies to sell only their products. And I will come back to that at some length in a little bit. We have advertising-laced Web portals and we have answering services at schools that provide a chirpy, friendly little reminder of who the corporate sponsor is and who is providing you access to your child’s homework record.

We have all of those. Marketing in schools, to paraphrase the ad for Virginia Slims -- some of you are old enough to remember that -- you’ve come a long way, baby. Advertising in schools is now extraordinarily pervasive, and it touches almost every aspect of school life, and not in a good way. It has a very clear and direct impact on our ability to provide a high-quality educational program for the students we are allegedly serving.

So, how did we get here? How did we get from McDonald’s in the exhibit hall, with that cute, mottled composition book catalog that they were handing out to 2003, to this wave of marketing in the schools, where you have principals and superintendents patting themselves on the back because they signed an exclusive agreement with a soft drink bottler, actually being proud of that? How did we get here?

Well, marketing in schools is nothing new. As I’ve researched this, the earliest example of attempting to market to children in schools was a hardware store in the late 1890’s. It was trying to put peripheral materials in schools with their marketing slogan on it.

The problem was perceived to be pervasive enough so that, in 1919, the National Education Association actually empanelled a committee, called the Committee on Propaganda in the Schools. It was called propaganda then, by the way, not supplemental learning materials. Which is, in itself, a kind of interesting rhetorical transformation between 1919 and the 1950’s, when propaganda became supplemental learning materials, as described in publications of the American Association of School Administrators and ASCD, which put out brochures and guidelines on the subject.

In the 1980’s, you may remember, we were "a nation at risk." That was the title of perhaps one of the most widely quoted, most influential, most wrongheaded, reports in the history of modern public education. It was a wonderful example of data-free policy advocacy. But, nevertheless, it was, by and large, a proposal for the kind of reforms that the education establishment, for want of a better word, really supported. It wasn’t a corporate report. Ronald Reagan disliked it so much that he almost didn’t turn up in the Rose Garden when Terrell Bell, his Secretary of Education, released it. He felt it was tainted by the point of view represented by the education establishment.

It wasn’t long before you would have believed that "A Nation at Risk" wasn’t the voice of the education establishment, it was the voice of corporate America, because they embraced it, particularly its assertion that it was massive American public school failure that created the economic crises of the late-seventies and early-eighties. They embraced that. And they signed on to a whole slew of corporate education reforms.

This is the era in which school-business partnerships took off like a rocket. Now it seems conventional wisdom, right, that there will be school-business partnerships. Any time a school touches a corporation in some way, it is a partnership. Well, in the 1980’s, "A Nation at Risk" is what created this corporate public school embrace. It helped define the context for this engagement.

At the same time, of course, the corporations were supporting the ideology behind "A Nation at Risk" and demanding that schools improve, they were also demanding a whole host of economic development strategies which had the effect of knocking the pins out from public funding for public schools. Economic development strategies, like tax incremental financing, industrial revenue bonding, equipment and inventory tax exemptions, and so on, all had the effect of transferring the tax liability, to a very large extent, from corporations to individual homeowners. And with the predictable consequence that, by the mid- and late-eighties and early-nineties, there were tax limitations measures on the ballot in many States, as homeowners found that they were literally sometimes, particularly fixed-income senior citizens and blue-collar workers, who saw their income declining throughout the eighties and into the nineties, that they literally had a choice to pay their ever-escalating public school tax bills or cap the amount of money. The only way they could give themselves a raise was to lower their taxes.

So, on the one hand, you have the explosion of school-business partnerships; on the other hand, you have the embrace of economic development strategies, which have the effect of constricting the resources available for public education.

So, now we arrive at the nineties. And in the nineties, democracy triumphed. Now, this ought to be good news for public education. Because those of you that are even casual students of American history realize that public education in this country was here at the birth of this country. It was very much on the minds of our Founding Fathers. It was much discussed during the Revolutionary War period. Education in the United States has a fundamentally different foundation than education in Europe or anywhere else in the world.

Bear in mind that the world that our Founding Fathers looked out upon was a world in which every other nation on earth was not a democracy, where a great number of nations were much more powerful economically and militarily than the United States. That being the case, the bulwark of republican governance and democratic values was understood to be a well-educated population.

You see, in Europe, with its inherited nobility and privilege, education was seen as a threat to the social order. People were to learn only what they needed to learn in order to accomplish the tasks to which they had been assigned by their status in life.

In the United States, by contrast, education was seen as a pillar of the social order, a democratic order that couldn’t survive an ignorant citizenry. So, public education has been and is political from the top to the bottom. And we forget that at our own peril, I think.

So, we have democracy triumphing in the nineties, the collapse of the Soviet Union. And it seems fair to ask, if democracy triumphed, then why is the preeminent democratic institution of our society, public education, under relentless assault and chronically underfunded? How is it possible to explain the triumph of the ideal upon which public education has been built and the assault on the institution of public education itself?

Let me suggest to you that what has happened is not the triumph of democracy so much as the triumph of an idea called the market and the translation of the idea of a citizen into the idea of a consumer. This is important because it stretches right through the whole discussion of commercialism in schools. From the most trivial-looking supplemental educational material produced by a corporation to sell one of its products, Gusher’s fruit snacks, potato chips, Mars bars, Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola, it shoots right through that to much more sophisticated developments such as the transformation of schooling itself into a product to be bought and sold.

We are much more likely to talk about our constituents in public education as consumers than as citizens. And that, in my mind at least, is a telling transformation. Because, you see, the market doesn’t care and is not set up to do something that public schools, as democratic institutions, must do. And that is to attend to the idea of equity and justice for all. The market doesn’t care.

The market is prepared to sell you a tenement or a palace. It is prepared to sell you a Mercedes or a Yugo. It is prepared to sell you a Taco Bell burrito or it’s prepared to sell you an exquisite meal at a French restaurant. You just have to have the money. It doesn’t care about justice. And it most certainly doesn’t care how you got the money.

Now, we have a couple of questions to ask ourselves about this entity, this thing that dominates our lives, called the market. It’s called a free market, isn’t it? It’s called a free market.

Question number one, just as a kind of mental experiment: Is the market a human or a divine conception? And I mean that quite seriously. Because when you hear conversations among mainstream economists these days, what they caution against is interference with the market, as if they were talking about divine will.